Rene Julian (1665 - 1745): A French Huguenot Comes to America

Cross of Languedoc  HERE

 Rene Julian was born in Vitré, Brittany, France, on 4 July 1669. He is our 7th great-grandfather. Some call him Rene de St. Julian, but that title was probably added in the 19th century by his descendants.

View of Vitré our ancestor would have seen

His parents were of the Huguenot religion (Calvinist), which was being severely suppressed by Louis XIV. You have two additional descents from French Huguenots, so might as well read about their history HERE  and  HERE  Unlike our other Huguenot ancestors, Rene Julian has not been added to the Huguenot Society of America's list of appropriate ancestors to be descended from for membership.

Brittany - Vitré is on the Breton - French Border

We may assume the entire family fled to England sometime after Rene's birth.  He became a soldier in King James II's army, but in 1688, when the Protestants, William and Mary of Orange, were invited by Parliament to dethrone Mary's Catholic father, our ancestor switched sides and joined the Glorious Revolution, allegedly fighting with William and 4200 other French Huguenots at the Battle of Boyne in Ireland in 1690. HERE

Rene would have seen King William before the battle, but the new monarch was sickly and asthmatic, so probably stayed in his tent.

Rene may have accompanied new governor Captain John Goddard to Bermuda in 1693. In that year Rene married Mary Scotley Bullock, daughter of wealthy tobacco planters Stephen and Marie Bullock, who were Quakers (a religion being persecuted in Bermuda Colony).  The Bullocks had been in Bermuda for some time; Stephen Bullock's father William Bullock had married Patience Paynter there in 1632. The marriage record on Ancestry.com has Mary's birth date as 1680, making her just 13 when she married Rene. It seems an odd match, a Huguenot soldier (even if possibly an officer) and a young Quaker girl, but perhaps they actually married in 1695, the year her father Stephen Bullock died, and her mother became a bit addled by this event and allowed the marriage.

Nonetheless, the couple sailed for South Carolina and resided in Berkeley County in the early 1700s.

Berkeley County, South Carolina

It was an unhealthy climate and they lost two sons, so they emigrated up to Cecil County, Maryland, probably with a colony of French Huguenots living on South Carolina's Santee River. Rene first appears on paper in Maryland Colony in 1712. They were too late in history to be given a grant of land (or were ignored) and so they leased. They had seven sons and three daughters who grew up on land at Bohemia Manor Plantation, which was owned by Augustine Herman, a Bohemian mapmaker and large landowner. Rene Julian owned slaves.

The Julians leased plantation was on the Chesapeake Bay in Cecil County.

In 1737, when he was 68, Rene assigned his lease to Henry McCoy and he, his wife, and some of his 10 children and their families moved to Winchester, in what was to become Frederick County in 1743, in Virginia's Northern Neck. They must have gone in order for the sons to obtain land of their own. At this time Old Frederick County encompassed a much larger area, including some of what is now West Virginia. But it was still a frontier.  Thomas, 6th Lord Fairfax, claimed over five million proprietary acres in this part of Virginia, but the Virginia Council claimed some of the same acreage. Both parties had been making grants of this land. Fairfax came from England in 1736 to defend his interests and rode out to Winchester in the Blue Ridge to inform the inhabitants they were on his land. Being a reasonable man, he simply required that they pay their rents to him instead of to the Council of Virginia. Fairfax became so enamored with his holdings that, after he won his dispute - a battle of maps each side commissioned, the winner decided by the Crown - he returned to build Greenway Court outside of Winchester, where he resided, a small stone land office nearby. He had more land to patent to settlers.

Frederick County, Virginia. You can see how it fits against Maryland.

 Rene Julian died in Frederick County, Virginia, in 1749 and Mary Bullock Julian in 1750. They are supposedly buried at Opequon Cemetery near Winchester, but no gravestones have been located.

Opaquon Cemetery, Frederick County, Virginia

Rene and Mary's son, George Julian, (our 6th great-grandfather) was born 1 March 1706 at Bohemia Manor, Cecil County, Maryland. In 1750 he was granted 400 acres along Back Creek in Frederick County. During the French and Indian War George Washington made Winchester his headquarters. Our ancestors must have seen him. After Braddock's defeat in 1755, HERE , some of the five sons who'd gone with Rene to Frederick County moved their families to Orange County, North Carolina, due to fear of Indian attacks - or just for a different type of land. This migration included George and his family. They went straight south, most likely on the trail called the Upper Road, to Orange County, North Carolina. (It later became Randolph and Guilford counties). 
  

And they took land grants there.

The part of Orange County that became Randolph County, North Carolina

George Julian died about 1781 in either Randolph County, North Carolina, or in York County, South Carolina, which had been created out of old Tyrone County, North Carolina, when South Carolina's boundary was drawn in 1772.

York County, South Carolina

 About 1728 in Cecil County, Maryland, George had married Martha Denton (b.1708, Cecil Co., MD; she died 1781, possibly in York Co., SC) (our 6th great-grandmother).  He and Martha had three sons - George, Jacob, and John (and a couple of daughters).  George Jr. (1726 - 1781) was a Tory and died of wounds at Dorchester, South Carolina, in September of 1781.  He is not our direct ancestor.

Some think Jacob Julian (1729 -1800) is our direct ancestor, but in his last will and testament he listed every child he'd sired, and Samuel Denton Julian (1780 - 1851), our 4th great-grandfather, is not one of them. That leaves only John Julian (1736 - unknown) as our 5th great-grandfather. And we know next to nothing about him, although I discovered a John Julian was granted 200 acres in Orange County in 1762; and I also discovered this Revolutionary War pay voucher (N.C. Archives at Raleigh online) for John Julin [sic], dated 9 September 1783, Hillsborough, Orange County, North Carolina, stating that he "exhibited his claim (illegible) allowed nine pounds." It appears our ancestor was a patriotic Revolutionary War soldier. I've found no other John Julian in North Carolina for this time period.

Pay voucher from American Revolution military service, Hillsborough, NC

We don't know John's wife's name.  We do know that Samuel Denton Julian was born in Rutherford County, North Carolina, in 1780 (you can see how close it was to York County, SC).

Rutherford County (formerly part of Tyrone County), North Carolina

We know that he was influenced by his great-aunt Catherine Julian's husband, Solomon Long, a Methodist minister, so much so that Samuel also became a Methodist minister. On 17 March 1803, he married Mary Condrey (1786-1854) (4th great-grandmother), whose father Claiborne Condrey (5th great-grandfather) was born in Tyrone (later Rutherford) County in 1754. Samuel served in the War of 1812 as a private in Captain Irvine's North Carolina 2d Reg. Militia, along with cousin Isham Julian.  He and his young family were in Henderson County, Kentucky, for the 1820 census. Why would a Methodist minister go west?  To find an empty pulpit, of course.

Henderson County, Kentucky

Samuel is mentioned in the History of Union County, Kentucky, as being one of its early Methodist ministers, performing his first marriage in 1822.

Union County, Kentucky

 On  April 3, 1826, Samuel made out the marriage certificate for his daughter Alice Julian's marriage to William Hill Dyson (our 3rd great-grandparents) at Morganfield, Union County, Kentucky. He possessed a fine hand.

Marriage certificate of William Hill Dyson and Alice Julian, 1826

It must have been a love match between Alice and William Hill Dyson because the Dysons were no doubt Anglican. But can you imagine William coming home to his father Bennet Dyson to say that there was a new preacher, "and his people came from Tidewater Maryland like ours did, Pa." The remnants of Maryland gentry in the wilds of Kentucky; they certainly must get to know one another.

Samuel's tenth and last child, Elizabeth Ann, was born in 1827 in Union County, Kentucky and daughter Alice Dyson had her first child in 1828 in Union County. Samuel Julian and his family then moved to Warrick County, Indiana, where he  and William Hill Dyson appeared on its census in 1830; he was granted a land patent for 80 acres on 1 August 1839 (having proved it up for 7 years). Daughter Alice (1806-1860) and William Hill Dyson (1801-1870) lived nearby. Samuel and Mary had 10 children between 1805 and 1827, nine living into adulthood.

Mt. Zion Church in Warrick County, Indiana where Samuel Denton Julian preached

After Samuel's death in Lynnville, Warrick County, on 10 December 1851, a fellow minister wrote:

 Memoirs: Reverend Samuel Julian For the Western Christian Advocate, A veteran Standard Bearer in the hosts of our Israel has fallen. For years it was his business to instruct us by his precept and example how to live and how he has taught us how to die. The subject of this sketch, the father of Reverend John W. Julian [b. 1814, Rutherford Co., N.C.] of the Indiana Conference, was born in Rutherford County, North Carolina, July 14, 1780. He embraced religion in 1812, received license to exhort in 1815. Removed to Union County, Kentucky in 1818 and was licensed as a local preacher. In 1821 he received ordination as a local Deacon, at the hands of Bishop Roberts in Louisville in 1826. In 1827 he was employed by the presiding Elder, Reverend George McNeely to travel Henderson Circuit, Kentucky Conference. In 1828 he was received on probation into the Kentucky Conference and appointed to the Livingston Circuit. In 1829 he traveled the Yellow Banks Circuit. In 1830 he was ordained Elder and admitted into full connection, transferred to the Illinois Conference and appointed to the Booneville Circuit. He traveled this circuit two years. In 1832 he was appointed to the Petersburg Circuit, which he traveled two years, also. In 1834 he was appointed to the Washington Circuit and at the close of the years received a location and settled in Warrick County, Indiana. Here he labored most assiduously and acceptably as a local preacher until the day of his death. I have seldom found a more useful local preacher. He possessed unusual bodily strength for one of his age. An indomitable energy. I have known him when he was 65 years old to walk 25 miles to a camp meeting and preach in one hour after his arrival with as much energy, earnestness and power as though he had not walked an hour. He was most emphatic in labors more abundant. His preaching talents were respectable. His power of exhortation was unusual and seldom excelled. I shall never forget some of the exhortations I have heard father Julian deliver. As a Christian he was exemplary. He was ardently attached to the Bible and for many years he made it a practice to read it through once each year. He read it through more than fifty times. He used scraps of time that many people permit to run to waste, to consult the oracles of God. During the two years I traveled the Lynnville Mission, in the bounds of which he lived, he was often at the parsonage but I think he never spent an hour with us without devoting a portion of the time to reading the Bible. He died December 10, 1851. He suffered much in his last illness but was sustained by grace and murmured not. He had lived to God and it was manifest that in dying he was the Lords. He triumphed over death through our Lord Jesus Christ. He was, no doubt, already met many in heaven whom he was instrumental in bringing to Christ and many more are on their way home who will be stars in his crown of rejoicing. - -James H. Noble February 13, 1852

Mary Condrey Julian died 8 January, 1854 in Lynnville, Warrick County, Indiana, no doubt surrounded by her children and grandchildren. The gravestone below replaced an earlier one.

Reverse of tombstone

Their Indiana descendants honor them, and so, also, do we.